The Most Expensive Day Of The Week: How Mondays Are Effecting The Economy

“God gave us Mondays to punish us for the things we did over the weekend.”

It’s that day of the week again; we all fear it come Sunday evening. It’s the dark cloud of inevitability waiting for us, the alarm clock smug as anything as it gets ready to pound your ears at 6:30am – our time is here: hello darkness my old friend. I’ve come to talk with you again.

If you compile all the ‘Monday Motivation’ posts which do the rounds on social media, there are no words or inspiring Instagram pictures which are going to help; load up the coffee, plug your earphones in, you can’t run away from it.

However, there are people that do runaway. Despite average sickness absentees in the UK at a record low for 2017 – 4.3 days off, compared to 7.2 in 1993 – Mondays are still the days where workers are looking to bunk off work according to figures form 2016.

That all too familiar phone call to HR on a Sunday evening is having a big impact on the economy. The first Monday of February – National Sick Day – is estimated to cost the UK economy £4.45million; adding to this, the third Monday of January this year saw the word depression googled once every two seconds in the UK. If ever there was a sentence to summarise Monday, that’d be it.

With research finding that absenteeism from work costs the average of £554-per-employee, Mondays play the most damaging part in this by recordings from 2016 highlighting that nine out of the top 10 missed days from 2016 were on a Monday.

Image Source: Small Business

If you’re therefore planning a Monday ‘sickie’ anytime soon, with the only fear being the role of the eyes from fellow office employees on Tuesday morning, think again how collectively Monday mornings are damaging the economy.

Sometimes we’ve just got to suck it up and face the music; once Mondays are over, it’s practically the weekend again anyway.